The day after Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, Rush Limbaugh was on the air to delegitimize him. He rallied despondent Republicans by saying Clinton was "only technically" president because he'd won a plurality of the vote, not a majority. That Clinton had no mandate to carry out any big policies (like health care reform).
Even before the election they grabbed at any straw or made-up rumor to generate headlines about non-stop "scandals". The entire goal of that was to hobble him and, even better in their eyes, to bring him down. Those continued throughout his presidency, even to the point of engineering a perjury trap on a personal matter to give them the excuse they needed to impeach him. An impeachment they went through with even though they knew the Senate would not vote to convict because it would mar and delegitimize him, Hillary, and all Democrats to the base they were cultivating.
Two years after Rush made delegitimizing Clinton as the de facto Republican message, the Republicans swept into a majority in the House, thanks to Rush and to equally incendiary Newt Gingrich. As Speaker, Gingrich set about changing the House rules to make it harder for congresspeople to "fraternize with the enemy" across the aisle, and expanded the Speaker's ability to put pressure on any members of his party who balked at this arrangement.
The late 90s is also when they started the "voter fraud" chant, scapegoating ACORN and other groups working to register low-income and minority people to vote. Like a lot of instruments in their band, it had been playing in the background for years until they brought it up front and made it one of the headliners.
Who are all those Republicans who "accepted Democracy"? The old guard who steadily retired as they found themselves being dismissed as "RINOs" by the new kids raised in the house that Rush & Newt built? They were OK with the 2000 election, which certainly called for some public criticism by prominent Republicans about Bush's "MINE MINE MINE" stance when it rested on a paper-thin margin in a state run by his brother with loads of ballot problems.
Everything they threw against Obama was launched off the foundations and playbook they'd built to block Clinton and hamstring Hillary. Nobody's trying to deny that they super-sized the racist portion of their mix, but how much of that was actually more, and how much was just the fig leafs coming off? All the pieces they needed were already in place.
If you think it started with Obama, then you're wrong. That was when the Republican foamer tide had come in far enough that your feet got wet. This tide has been rising and getting foamier for a very long time.
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